Southern Avenue was the first road where the Calcutta skyline started changing in the early 1960s. The quiet avenue by the lake, now called Rabindra Sarobar, was lined by trees and quaint, bungalow-type houses. The trees still remain but most of those houses have long given way to the city's first multi-storeyed residential blocks.Usually, residents of these buildings would have little to do with the hoi polloi from downmarket Kalighat or Chetla, except that the domestic hands in these upper middle class homes come mostly from these places.
But when Mamata Banerjee came campaigning along the road, housewives and kids jostled with domestic helps to have a closer look at her. Many of the domestics proudly proclaimed that ``didi'' was their neighbour. For Mamata lives in a rundown, tiled-roof, one-storey house at Kalighat on the bank of a grimy old canal called Tolley's Nullah. But the rich housewives too claimed her their own, politically.
Her popularity cuts across the high and the low of Bengalisociety. She is idolised also by people, like the residents of the Southern Avenue high-rises, with whom she has nothing in common.
At a stone's throw from one end of Southern Avenue is Hindustan Park where Jyoti Basu's father, a successful homoeopathic doctor, built a three-storeyed house in the 1930s. Bengal's Marxist patriarch lived there all his life until six years ago when he moved to his official residence at the new, upmarket township of Salt Lake on Calcutta's eastern fringe.
But long before Basu moved away from Hindustan Park, the stiffest challenge of his political career, spanning more than half a century, came from the girl next door.
In fact, ever since she trounced another Marxist heavyweight, Somnath Chatterjee, from neighbouring Jadavpur constituency in 1984, Mamata Banerjee has become the darling of Bengal's anti-CPI(M) masses. Just as Basu remained the Left icon.
Her folks revelled in her iconoclastic image. Often, she has done things which have bordered on melodrama or farce. Likewhen she stormed a police station in Behala in the company of her faithfuls, ``seized'' the chair of the officer-in-charge and smeared his face with tar. Or, when, in a frenzied fit, she threatened before a doting crowd to hang herself with her own shawl on a Calcutta street.
That is vintage Mamata and her people love her all the more for her street fights. ``She may be unorthodox in some ways. But show us another fighter like her,'' said a middle-aged woman who waited for hours to hear her campaign at Ashok Nagar near the Tollygunge Tram Depot the other day. ``Isn't she the only Congress leader to risk even her life at the hands of CPM goondas?'' said a shopkeeper. This time, however, she has plunged herself into the grimmest of her battles so far. ``All these years I fought only the CPI(M). This time I have to fight two enemies at the same time -- the CPI(M) and its B team, the Congress,'' she goes around telling cheering crowds at meeting after meeting.
Having carried her battle to the farthest cornersof the State, Mamata came home to roost at her Calcutta South constituency. ``This is from where I gave my `Save Bengal' call and it's now reverberating everywhere.'' And, she traverses her territory like an unstoppable chief in battle.
Yet, she was stopped during her campaign at Topsia last week by a crowd of Muslim voters, mostly women. There was Bengal's very own Mamata sitting inside her car, fuming at the local Congress councillor of the municipal corporation and the CPI(M), who, she said, had conspired to prevent her from reaching out to the Muslims.
Muslims are angry with her, her one-time lieutenant and Congress opponent this time Saugata Roy said, for aligning with the BJP. Her CPI(M) rival and former city Mayor, Prasanta Sur, claimed that the Muslims had not liked her honeymoon with the BJP.
``Yes, there's some confusion in the community,'' conceded Mohammed Sohrab, a tailor in the Watgunj area, who came to listen to her at a meeting in the area.
In fact, Mamata seems to have taken achallenge in aligning her party, Trinamool Congress, with the BJP. There are about 1,50,000 Muslim voters in her constituency.
Mamata dismisses this in her own way. ``It's the CPI(M) which is trying to bring in such communal elements in the campaign. In Bengal, religion is insignificant. You are either for or against CPI(M).'' Generally true. But her followers are a trifle worried.
Soon after she announced her decision to break away from the Congress and fight the elections with seat adjustments with the BJP, she presented two Imams of local mosques to prove that Muslims were with her. One of these Imams subsequently deserted her and issued a statement asking Muslims not to vote the Trinamool Congress-BJP candidates.
Both her Congress and CPI(M) rivals are banking on the Muslim factor in the constituency. When the CPI(M) held an anti-American protest over Iraq in the constituency, it was seen by many as an election ploy to exploit Muslim sentiments.
That seems to be the only hurdle in a race which isotherwise set to see her on the winning post again. Unlike for other seats in West Bengal, the Marxists cannot hope to defeat her because of a split in the Congress vote. For she looks set to carry away the majority of the party's vote in this Congress-dominated constituency. The Muslim factor can at best reduce her margin of victory -- from 103,000 last time.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
